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Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#721

Post by notyourwork »

ehsankia wrote: post #708
notyourwork wrote: post #3

I don't build extensions or work on much front end web lately but this reads like Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. > By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated. > If you are building your own integrations with Google Docs, we recommend using Google Work…

Did you feel the same when Maps went from HTML to Canvas? There is no factual basis for your claims. The simplest and most obvious answer is performance. Docs these days can take 5-10s to fully open, especially with comments and annotations.

No factual basis? Moving from DOM produced content to canvas produced content closes off your ability as a user to see what is happening.

As for Google Maps, it is not speedy or snappy by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is pretty abysmal in terms of page performance on the web.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#722

Post by thehappypm »

abxytg wrote: post #376

Would love to hear a Googler justify this. It's just closing down the web. No more view source for the curious kids. Shame on you.

Not a Googler, but I've done many projects in both Canvas and HTML/CSS/JS.

Canvas is actually really hard to get right. You basically are given these super basic tools and have to go do everything yourself. With HTML and CSS you're standing on the shoulders of giants. With Canvas you're drawing arcs and squares and lines.

That being said, canvas is the kind of thing if you DO get it right, it's awesome. It's just fast. And really portable: every platform supports a canvas of some kind, and the primitives tend to be really similar.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#723

Post by nine_k »

tshaddox wrote: post #606
Sophira wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could... except: a) It would be completely inaccessible to blind users; b) Sometimes devs want to be able to give users some choice, like copying text, and this is impossible with your proposed method. These two reasons alone mean it's undesirable for devs to use these, and they're problems that Canvas addresses - albeit by letting the devs have that choice, but not the users .

There are several other ways to prevent copying text or making it difficult, some of which probably don't impact screen readers (although I'm skeptical that many developers would be intent on preventing the copying of text while also caring about screen readers). And, of course, if the developer wants to allow copying text, that's trivial. How does canvas give a developer more ability to choose which things the user…

You cannot Ctrl+U and see the source. You cannot Shift+Ctrl+I and inspect the DOM.

All you get is a bitmap, which is not even that easy to access. Much like a frame generated by a game engine.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#724

Post by kannanvijayan »

snewman wrote: post #680

Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…

I'd like to chime in here as someone who has worked on optimizing the execution of your code :) Google docs specifically was one of the subjects of a particular performance push when I was working on Spidermnonkey within Firefox, and I got to see how it behaves under the hood pretty well.

The thing that stands out to me the most was the giant sparse array (a regular js-native array) being used to store layout information, presumably. It really messed with our internals because spidermonkey didn't expect those to be used in fastpaths, and it was really lazy about trying to optimize for them.

Anecdotes aside.. I wanted to endorse your entire comment :) I remember thinking to myself how terrible it was to have to piggyback a document layout engine on top of HTML layout and these awful JS abstractions, and how much better and more performant it would be to do a proper layout engine - either in JS or compile-to-wasm, and have it run its own rendering logic.

In particular for large documents where you were making changes to early parts of the document, a single keystroke could invoke this _cascade_ of sparse array fetches and mutations and DOM rearrangements and all sorts of fireworks.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#725

Post by rikarendsmp »

skyde wrote: post #582
dangoor wrote: post #563

In 2009, I joined Mozilla and started working on the Bespin[1] project, which Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer had brought to Moz. Bespin was built with a canvas-based renderer. Bespin was way faster than other browser-based code editors at the time. Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects. edit to add: and switching to D…

Can someone explain why https://makepad.dev/ is extremely slow and "unusable" on Microsoft Edge browser but run smoothly on Chrome? Is it because of bad WebGL perf on JavasSript perf in general?

I tried for it not to be, however there is no technically specific reason no.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#726

Post by moshmosh »

alisonkisk wrote: post #712
moshmosh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that's kept everyone from doing that, so far, is accessibility. If not for that all the major ad platform companies (FB, Twitter, Google, and so on) would be already be all-in on Canvas. Accessibility concerns make it both expensive to develop a UI that renders to canvas, and ensures that the content can be processed & understood by a program (else how will assistive tools read it?), which opens up the…

Do you have any evidence for this idea?

Only that it's a really obvious move for them, for a few reasons (including that making it the norm for stopping ad blockers and trackers forces all their would-be competitors to play catch-up on basic taken-for-granted stuff like displaying text on a screen) and accessibility is the only thing I'm aware of that attacks both the difficulty of the project and the feasibility of the desired outcome, sufficiently to explain why they've not at least given it a shot.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#727

Post by nhumrich »

wlesieutre wrote: post #6

RIP web accessibility when everyone starts doing this to make ad blocking more difficult

Sure this impacts google docs free users, but the blog post is on google workspaces, which already has 0 ads. Google never has and never will advertise on a google workspace account.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#728

Post by SavantIdiot »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #533
SavantIdiot wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are trying to make DOM be a WYSWIG text editor. You're point is dead on. The response is to write an opaque, vendor-specific "DOM". Which is the complete opposite of what HTML was supposed to be. But the browser is now a platform and not a browser, so the metaphors are horribly mixed to the point where I'm not even sure what a DOM is supposed to be anymore.

The DOM was always a WYSIWYG editor – albeit, for HTML, not text. Though, back in the day, HTML was a subset of text with image and table support; none of this fancy `line-height: 1.5em;`… I wish the web had evolved in a more documenty way.

Hmmm... maybe I should have chosen a different acronym.

What you expected to see isn't alwasy what you got.

WYETSIAWYG

Rendering across browsers and operating systems was a trainwreck until maybe 5 years ago (over a decade of polyfill is finally gone). And even with an ecosystem like ElectronJS + Bootstrap, Win10 MacOS and Linux all look slightly different.

So yes and no to "DOM was always...", but more "No."

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#729

Post by xattt »

snewman wrote: post #680

Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…

I have nothing to add to the discussion, other than I’ve been using Writely since ~2005-2006 and wanted to say thanks for all the fish!

It was super handy before I had a laptop for regular use. I used it at public libraries for projects in my last year of high school. It helped me develop a habit of having a third-space workplace that was away from home and school.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#730

Post by seumars »

dgudkov wrote: post #264
notyourwork wrote: post #3

I don't build extensions or work on much front end web lately but this reads like Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. > By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated. > If you are building your own integrations with Google Docs, we recommend using Google Work…

>Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. That's because the old problem "web-document vs web-application" hasn't been solved properly. HTML was designed for documents. It wasn't designed for applications. No wonder as applications become more sophisticated they try to squeeze out HTML/DOM where possible.

The irony being that Docs is a web document editor
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